Chapter 4: A Story of “Accountable” Talk: Unsettling the Normalization of a Culture of Performance at Márquez Elementary

In this chapter, I draw from fieldwork conducted for my dissertation and in order to provide a reflexive examination of the normalization of a culture of performance at Márquez Elementary, a high-performing, high-minority school located in a performance-oriented school district in Texas. Additionally, I seek to provide readers with theoretically informed reflections on the conflicts, complications and possibilities I experienced as a former administrator conducting a year-long qualitative study of the school. I struggled with issues of researcher power, standpoint, and subjectivity (Denzin & Lincoln, 1998; Dewalt, Dewalt, & Wayland, 1998; Foley, 2002; Hatch, 2003) and felt conflicted over how to engage the effects of high-stakes testing and the resulting culture of performance while “in the field” a “field” where two years before, I had been an administrator in a similarly populated school within the same district. I conclude with implications for guiding former administrators in school-based qualitative research projects and a discussion about teaching through explicitly engaging theoretically-informed critical perspectives within educational field(s) powerfully informed by functionalist “results-based” or “performance-oriented” discourses and practices.